A Steal on Yalta

One of the policies agreed on at Yalta had its first test, but not a fair one. At Yalta the Big Three declared that they would concert their policies to insure decent, stable governments in troubled countries taken from the Axis. Last week, before any concert could be worked out, such a situation arose in Rumania.

For a fortnight Rumania's Premier General Nicolai Radescu had stubbornly defied every effort by the small but vociferous pro-Communist National Democratic Front to drive him out of office. Denunciations, demonstrations, minor riots in four cities, even an attempted assassination had failed to force the unpolitical Premier's resignation (TIME, March 5). Last week things suddenly began to happen.

A puffy, spectacled man with a nervous tic in the left cheek and a shock of unruly grey hair arrived unexpectedly in Bucharest, from Moscow. Andrei Januari Vishinsky, Soviet Vice Commissar of Foreign Affairs, looked more than ever like an absentminded, amiable professor. But the Kremlin's ace trouble-shooter -- and the tigerish prosecutor of the Moscow Old Bolshevik trials -- had not come out of absentmindedness.

Within a few hours of Vishinsky's arrival, Premier Radescu resigned. Young King Mihai tried a surprise move: he appointed elegant, 71-year-old Prince Barbu Stirbey, lover of the late Queen Marie of Rumania, to form a new Government. When Stirbey's attempt failed, Mihai appointed Dr. Peter Groza, aggressive leader of the troublemaking Democratic National Front -- a thickset, moonfaced Transylvanian in the early 60s, whose large inherited land holdings qualified him to head the Ploughmen's Front. Until last year Groza was a small-time Balkan politician who made headlines when two angry landlords beat him up in the foyer of Bucharest's Athenee Palace Hotel.

This week, just to make matters a little more Rumanian, the son of the deposed Premier denounced his father for having ordered troops to fire on the demonstrators (an incident which did occur, although the troops fired into the air and no one was killed).

Thus an aggressive leftist minority seized control of Rumania before Britain and the U.S.--and quite possibly before Russia, whose Commissar had just arrived on the scene--had a chance to make good their pledge of maintaining a representative interim Government.

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